How to acquire write lock on a node? - ruby-on-rails

I want to do something like this (ruby, cypher queries):
// ACQUIRE WRITE LOCK ON NODE 1
// SOME CODE THAT DO READ AND THEN WRITE, e.g.:
results = neo.query("MATCH (n {id: 1}) RETURN n")
...
case results.size
when 0
neo.create_node(properties)
when 1
neo.update_node(results.first, properties)
...
// RELEASE WRITE LOCK ON NODE 1
According to docs, http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/stable/transactions-isolation.html:
By default a read operation will read the last committed value unless a local modification within the current transaction exist. The default isolation level is very similar to READ_COMMITTED: reads do not block or take any locks so non-repeatable reads can occur. It is possible to achieve a stronger isolation level (such as REPETABLE_READ and SERIALIZABLE) by manually acquiring read and write locks.
http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/stable/transactions.html:
One can manually acquire write locks on nodes and relationships to achieve higher level of isolation (SERIALIZABLE).
But there is nowhere mentioned anything about how to acquire the lock or how to change the isolation level.

There is no support at the moment for overriding the default READ_COMMITTED isolation level through the REST API. Manually overriding isolation level can be achieved only if using Neo4j embedded in your Java application.
We'll add a note to the documentation page you referenced to make that a bit more clear.

Related

How to define Alerts with exception in InfluxDB/Kapacitor

I'm trying to figure out the best or a reasonable approach to defining alerts in InfluxDB. For example, I might use the CPU batch tickscript that comes with telegraf. This could be setup as a global monitor/alert for all hosts being monitored by telegraf.
What is the approach when you want to deviate from the above setup for a host, ie instead of X% for a specific server we want to alert on Y%?
I'm happy that a distinct tickscript could be created for the custom values but how do I go about excluding the host from the original 'global' one?
This is a simple scenario but this needs to meet the needs of 10,000 hosts of which there will be 100s of exceptions and this will also encompass 10s/100s of global alert definitions.
I'm struggling to see how you could use the platform as the primary source of monitoring/alerting.
As said in the comments, you can use the sideload node to achieve that.
Say you want to ensure that your InfluxDB servers are not overloaded. You may want to allow 100 measurements by default. Only on one server, which happens to get a massive number of datapoints, you want to limit it to 10 (a value which is exceeded by the _internal database easily, but good for our example).
Given the following excerpt from a tick script
var data = stream
|from()
.database(db)
.retentionPolicy(rp)
.measurement(measurement)
.groupBy(groupBy)
.where(whereFilter)
|eval(lambda: "numMeasurements")
.as('value')
var customized = data
|sideload()
.source('file:///etc/kapacitor/customizations/demo/')
.order('hosts/host-{{.hostname}}.yaml')
.field('maxNumMeasurements',100)
|log()
var trigger = customized
|alert()
.crit(lambda: "value" > "maxNumMeasurements")
and the name of the server with the exception being influxdb and the file /etc/kapacitor/customizations/demo/hosts/host-influxdb.yaml looking as follows
maxNumMeasurements: 10
A critical alert will be triggered if value and hence numMeasurements will exceed 10 AND the hostname tag equals influxdb OR if value exceeds 100.
There is an example in the documentation handling scheduled downtimes using sideload
Furthermore, I have created an example available on github using docker-compose
Note that there is a caveat with the example: The alert flaps because of a second database dynamically generated. But it should be sufficient to show how to approach the problem.
What is the cost of using sideload nodes in terms of performance and computation if you have over 10 thousand servers?
Managing alerts manually directly in Chronograph/Kapacitor is not feasible for big number of custom alerts.
At AMMP Technologies we need to manage alerts per database, customer, customer_objects. The number can go into the 1000s. We've opted for a custom solution where keep a standard set of template tickscripts (not to be confused with Kapacitor templates), and we provide an interface to the user where only expose relevant variables. After that a service (written in python) combines the values for those variables with a tickscript and using the Kapacitor API deploys (updates, or deletes) the task on the Kapacitor server. This is then automated so that data for new customers/objects is combined with the templates and automatically deployed to Kapacitor.
You obviously need to design your tasks to be specific enough so that they don't overlap and generic enough so that it's not too much work to create tasks for every little thing.

Set num of output shard in Write.to(Sink) in dataflow

I am having a customized sink extending FileBasedSink to which I write to by calling PCollection.apply(Write.to(MySink)) in dataflow (very simpler to XmlSink.java). However it seems by default simply calling Write.to will always result to 3 output shards? Is there any way that I could define the number of output shard (like TextTO.Write.withNumShards) just in customized sink class definition? or I have to define another customized PTransformer like TextIO.Write?
Unfortunately, right now FileBasedSink does not support specifying the number of shards.
In practice, the number of shards you get will be dependent on how the framework chooses to optimize the parts of the pipeline producing the collection you're writing, so there's essentially no control over that.
I've filed a JIRA issue for your request so you can subscribe to the status.

Neo4j and concurrent writes, how to handle deadlock issues, preferably server-side?

I'm running into issues with deadlocks during concurrent merge operations (REST API). I have a function that processes text with some metadata, and for each item in the metadata dictionary, I'm performing a merge to add either a node or connect the text node with the metadata[n] node. Issues come up when the message rate is around 500-1000 per second.
In this particular function, there are 11 merges between 6 queries, which go something like this:
q1 = "MERGE (n:N { id: {id} }) ON CREATE SET ... ON MATCH SET "
"WITH . MERGE (...) "
"WITH ., . MERGE (.)-[:some_rel]->(.)"
params = {'the': 'params'}
cypher.execute(q1, params)
if some_condition:
q2 = "MATCH (n:N { id: {id} }) ... "
"WITH n, . MERGE (n)-[:some_rel]->(.)"
params = {'more': 'params'}
cypher.execute(q2, params)
if some_condition2:
q3
...
if some_condition_n:
qn
I'm running the above with Python, via Celery (for those not familiar with Celery, it's a distributed task queue). When the issue first came up, I was executing the above in a single transaction, and had a ton of failures due to deadlock exceptions. My initial thought was simply to implement a distributed blocking lock at the function level with Redis. This, however, causes a bottleneck in my app.
Next, I switched from a single Cypher transaction a few atomic transactions as in the above and removed the lock. This takes care of the bottleneck, as well as greatly reducing the number of deadlock exceptions, but they're still occurring, albeit at the reduced level.
Graph databases aren't really my thing, so I don't have a ton of experience with the in's and out's of Neo4j and Cypher. I have a secondary-index in Redis of the uuid's of existing nodes, so there is a pre-processing step prior to the merge's to try and keep the graph access down. Are there any obvious solutions that I should try? Maybe there's some way to queue the operations on the graph-side, or maybe I'm overlooking some server optimizations? Any advice on where to look would be appreciated. Thanks!
Okay, after thinking about this some more, I realized that the way my queries were executed was inefficient and could do with some refactoring. Since all the queries are within the same general context, there is no reason to execute them all individually, or even no reason to open a transaction and have them executed that way.
Instead, I changed function to go through the conditionals, and concatenate the query strings into one long string, and add the params that I need to the param dictionary. So, now, there's only one execution at the end, with one statement. This also takes out some of the 'MATCH' statements.
This fix doesn't wholly fix the issue, though, as there are still some deadlock exceptions being thrown.
I think I found the issue, mainly that there wasn't an issue to begin with. That is:
The Enterprise version of Neo4j has an alternative lock manager than
the Community version, meant to provide scalable locking on
high-CPU-count machines.
The Enterprise Lock Manager uses a deadlock detection algorithm that
does not require (much) synchronization, which gives it some very
desirable scalability attributes. The drawback is that it may
sometimes detect false-positives. This normally does not happen in
production usage, but becomes evident in stress testing individual
operations. These scenarios see much lower churn in CPU cache
invalidation, which the enterprise lock manager needs to communicate
across cores.
As a deadlock detection error is a safe-to-retry error and the user is
expected to handle these in all application code, since there may be
legitimate deadlocks at any time, this behavior is actually by design
to gain scalability.
I simply caught the exception and then retry after a few seconds and now:

How can I emit summary data for each window even if a given window was empty?

It is really important for my application to always emit a "window finished" message, even if the window was empty. I cannot figure out how to do this. My initial idea was to output an int for each record processed and use Sum.integersGlobally and then emit a record based off that, giving me a singleton per window, I could then simply emit one summary record per window, with 0 if the window was empty. Of course, this fails, and you have to use withoutDefaults which will then emit nothing if the window was empty.
Cloud Dataflow is built around the notion of processing data that is likely to be highly sparse. By design, it does not conjure up data to fill in those gaps of sparseness, since this will be cost prohibitive for many cases. For a use case like yours where non-sparsity is practical (creating non-sparse results for a single global key), the workaround is to join your main PCollection with a heartbeat PCollection consisting of empty values. So for the example of Sum.integersGlobally, you would Flatten your main PCollection<Integer> with a secondary PCollection<Integer> that contains exactly one value of zero per window. This assumes you're using an enumerable type of window (e.g. FixedWindows or SlidingWindows; Sessions are by definition non-enumerable).
Currently, the only way to do this would be to write a data generator program that injects the necessary stream of zeroes into Pub/Sub with timestamps appropriate for the type of windows you will be using. If you write to the same Pub/Sub topic as your main input, you won't even need to add a Flatten to your code. The downside is that you have to run this as a separate job somewhere.
In the future (once our Custom Source API is available), we should be able to provide a PSource that accepts an enumerable WindowFn plus a default value and generates an appropriate unbounded PCollection.

using AUGraph vs direct connections between Audio Units by means of a GCD queue

So i've gone thru the Audio Unit Hosting Guide for iOS and they hint all along that one might always want to use an AUGraph instead of direct connections between AUs. Among the most notable reasons they mention a high-priority thread, being able to reconfigure the graph while it is running and general thread-safety.
My problem is that I'm trying to get as close to "making my own custom dsp effects" as possible given that iOS does not really let you dynamically load custom code. So, my approach is to create a generic output unit and write the DSP code in its render callback. Now the problem with this approach is if I wanted to chain two of these units with custom callbacks in a graph. Since a graph must have a single output au (for head), trying to add any more output units won't fly. That is, I cant have 2 Generic I/O units and a Remote I/O unit in sequence in a graph.
If I really wanted to use AUGraphs, I can think of one solution along the lines of:
A graph interface that internally keeps an AUGraph with a single Output unit plus, for each connected node in the graph, a list of "custom callback" generic output nodes that are in theory connected to such node. Maybe it could be a class / interface over AUNode instead, but hopefully you get the idea.
If I add non output units to this graph, it essentially connects them in the usual way to the backing AUGraph.
If however, I add a generic output node, this really means adding the node's au to the list and whichever node I am connecting in the graph to, actually gets its input scope / element 0 callback set to something like:
for each unit in your connected list:
call AudioUnitRender(...) and merge in ioData;
So that the node which is "connected" to any number of those "custom" nodes basically pulls the processed output from them and outputs it to whatever next non-custom node.
Sure there might be some loose ends in the idea above, but I think this would work with a bit more thought.
Now my question is, what if instead I do direct connections between AUs without an AUGraph whatsoever? Without an AUGraph in the picture, I can definitely connect many generic output units with callbacks to one final Remote I/O output and this seems to work just fine. Thing is kAudioUnitProperty_MakeConnection is a property. So I'm not sure that once an AU is initialized I can re set properties. I believe if I uninitialize then it's ok. If so, couldn't I just get GCD's high priority queue and dispatch any changes in async blocks that uninitialize, re connect and initialize again?

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